On a related note to yesterday’s post, I recently read online about Sunbutter. It’s a peanut butter substitute made in a nut-free facility, out of sunflower seeds.

I was practically raised on peanut butter sandwiches and it remains one of my most favourite foods in the entire world (Skippy brand preferred, but I will accept Kraft; smooth versions only). I gave up peanut butter while pregnant and nursing which means I haven’t really been able to have it for almost six years now.

Sir Monkeypants and I like peanut butter so much that — and I know other allergy moms out there are going to freak out at this one — we actually keep a container of peanut butter in the house. Sir Monkeypants occasionally indulges in a PB sandwich after all the kids are in bed, and we always are very careful to clean up everything afterwards, but it still makes me nervous. Not nervous enough to give it up, however; I’ve been waiting for the day when I wean Little Miss Sunshine to sit down to one giant PB sandwich myself.

So when I heard about the Sunbutter, I was pretty excited. I thought, here’s a safe product for the whole family! Captain Jelly Belly can experience the joy of a “peanut butter” sandwich, and I can have all the sandwiches I want, too, and our house will be a safe place! Yay!

We drove all over town on Monday looking for some and finally found it for EIGHT DOLLARS A BOTTLE at Rainbow Foods. I think it’s probably actually cheaper, given today’s exchange rates, to order it online. But whatever, I couldn’t wait, I HAD TO HAVE IT.

And you know what?

IT IS FUCKING AWESOME.

Most delicious thing ever. TOTALLY, exactly like peanut butter. I am in HEAVEN.

We actually bought two kinds — the organic, which is made exclusively from ground sunflower seeds, and the “original,” which has sugar and a little oil added (SO totally like Skippy, I am amazed).

It took me a long, long time to force the kids to taste it. I held out for THREE HOURS. No other foods, no other treats, no pushing people on the swing until they tried the frickin’ Sunbutter.

So finally the Captain gave in.

And you know what?

HE LOVES IT.

We both had Sunbutter sandwiches for lunch yesterday. And then again for an afternoon snack. And I’m sure we’ll have more today.

All in all…Best. Product. Ever. I cannot recommend it enough!

Raise your hand if you are tired of hearing about the Captain’s various issues with food in this blog.

(Both of mine are waving frantically in the air.)

Sigh.

So Captain Jelly Belly has passed his celiac test, meaning, he is not intolerant to gluten. This is good news, and I’m trying to think of it that way. He passed all the other tests too (save the cystic fibrosis test, which won’t be until September, but I’m quite confident that that one will be negative anyway). He’s a little low on iron. That’s it.

We should be happy, but there’s still the fact that the Captain either throws up or has a “day of diarrhea” at least three or four times a week. He’s sick so often that all of us take it as a matter of course. He’s stopped bothering to tell us when he has a messy poop — usually I only find out about it if he forgets to flush. Then he’s all, “Oh yeah, and I had a few more messy poops earlier.” A kid who is five years old should not expect to have diarrhea. A kid who is five years old should not be so cavalier about vomit that he can barely interrupt his playing to turn to the side to barf. Or to eat a little dinner, vomit, and then return to the table to eat more. It’s not right.

It’s been at least three and a half years since we figured out that the Captain’s almost-daily barfing was not normal, and that we needed to figure out what was going on. Three and a half years, and still we only have partial answers and theories to go on.

Although I love all our doctors and I think they are smart, caring people, I’m really losing faith in the medical profession.

The Captain is going for more allergy testing in August and once again, we hope to find some magic bullet, some heretofore unfound massive allergy that will explain everything. An answer that will resolve all his problems with a simple diet elimination.

But it probably won’t happen.

I guess if we don’t find any new allergies, the next step is to look at some alternative medicines and therapies. I must say, that kind of thing is very, very, NOT ME. I think of people who are marketing their “magic solutions” to desperate people as charlatans, people who take advantage of sick people to make money while sucking even more of their hope away. But I’m not sure what else to do at this point.

I guess we’ll just enter a holding pattern until the August test. Then we’ll figure out what to do next.

It’s Tour de France time, and in our house, that means all bikes, all the time. Sir Monkeypants was a bit of a bike rider back in the day, and as such he loves to watch the Tour. Watching the Tour is actually the reason why we got cable TV in the first place, because you can only get daily coverage on OLN (possibly called “Versus” now, but that is a stupid name, OLN). The first year we got cable, we watched hours of Tour coverage every single day, and it’s been no different in the years since.

When Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley were little babies, I got to watch all the Tour coverage I wanted because they were either napping, or unable to complain about the choice of TV show. I love to watch the live Tour coverage every morning because the commentators are the legendary Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin. Those two know everything there is to know about every rider on the tour; their comments are insightful and detailed and fascinating.

This year I can’t watch the Tour coverage during the day very much because the Captain and the Gal think that bikes are boooooooring, and if Mommy has the time to watch a booooooring bike show, doesn’t she have time to play Candyland? Again? So instead, I’ve been watching some of the evening coverage, which isn’t nearly as good. OLN replays the same video footage, but replaces the Phil/Paul commentary with more “American friendly” commentators (Phil and Paul have English accents), and the American dudes just do not measure up. They’re often blabbing on about meaningless stuff and they never seem to have a firm grasp on who we are seeing on the screen, and what the impact is of this particular stage. Still, Tour coverage is Tour coverage, I guess.

I’d tape the morning coverage to watch in the evenings but our PVR is awfully busy keeping up with In The Night Garden and Backyardigans. But now that they’ve entered the mountains, I may tell the kids to LUMP IT.

The big Tour news this year, at least for us, is that there is a Canadian in there. Ryder Hesjedal, from Victoria, rides for the American team Garmin-Chipotle. It’s the first time in more than a decade — since before we got cable — that a Canadian has ridden in the tour. Usually, you get a handful of Americans (there are four of them this year), maybe a few Australians and a South African, and the rest are all European. I’m pretty excited to have a home boy to cheer for. I think this could really sway the Captain, too, into being on my side when it comes to vote on what the TV will be showing. He likes sports in general but he LOVES sports when there is a Canadian person or team to cheer for. We can turn it into a whole flag-waving event!

Do you think Ryder’s parents knew he’d want to be a biker when they gave him that name? It really seems too incredibly awesome a coincidence.

Ryder, by the way, will also be racing at the Olympics, which seems like a pretty busy year for him. I’m getting to be a huge fan already. Rock on with your bad self, Ryder!

Now I must run, because Phil and Paul are on.

I don’t usually like to go on and on about my overwhelming love of So You Think You Can Dance, because I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, and once I get on a roll about dancing I really just cannot. Shut. Up.

In fact, I could probably fill this whole blog, day-in and day-out, with a discussion of the dancing in various musicals. During So You Think You Can Dance season, I’d need at least three or four posts a day, because it simply requires that kind of analysis.

But I just HAVE TO say that I almost peed my pants during Katee and Joshua’s Bollywood routine last night. I’m married to an Indian man and as such I’ve seen a few Bollywood musicals in my time, and oh boy, do I ever LOVE THEM. Seriously.

I love Hollywoood musicals too, but they stopped making those years ago and I’ve seen them all at least 20 times a piece. The stuff that is still coming out of Bollywood is so grand, so dazzling, so spectacular spectacular that it shames regular Hollywood films. The story is always epic. The clothes…oh the clothes…so many beautiful colours, so many fantastic costume changes. And the musical numbers…the changes of scenery! The changes of clothes mid-song! The complete and total embracing of the artificial nature of it! It’s beautiful and amazing and seriously, the MOST entertaining thing. I cannot get enough.

So when they announced that Katee and Joshua — one of the strongest couples on the show — were going to do Bollywood, I had to call Sir Monkeypants to the TV right away in excitement. And they did not let me down! All the traditional moves, all the traditional hand motions, there! Totally accurate, well performed, and ROCKING AWESOME.

I’m still shaking with excitement.

And this is why I try to keep myself from writing about dancing if at all possible.

You can see Katee and Joshua’s big number on YouTube (of course) here.

So my little car accident situation has been completely resolved, to my great relief. It turns out that our car insurance policy has a $0 deductible (I did not know such policies existed), and that because this is my first at-fault accident, and the total damages are less than $1000, all is forgiven and there will be no change to our insurance rates. So basically, I can just forget about everything and it will all go away. We even have about $350 left in the accident budget to get the van officially repaired, instead of just touched up by ourselves, if we want. So all good.

One thing that I did not tell Sir Monkeypants about this accident is that I kind of had a chance to walk away from it at the start. When our cars first rubbed together, we got out to have a look and I said that I guessed we should trade information. However, it was at one of the busiest corners in all of Ottawa at a busy time of day, and there were probably a hundred cars being held up by what was really a very minor accident. I had pulled forward a bit so there was a car’s space of room between us and people were trying to nudge through, which made it dangerous for us to go back and forth between our cars, and everyone around us was honking and giving us dirty looks and in general doing everything in their power to up my tension level by like, a thousand percent. And to top it all off, neither of us could find a pen.

So what happened was, the other guy, SUVGuy, gave me his business card and told me to call him. Then he drove away.

I’m pretty sure that after he left he totally thought he would never hear from me again. I’m sure he thought he’d have to pay for the repair himself, or claim it on his insurance and have to absorb that cost instead. He didn’t know my name or where I lived or anything about me, there was no police report or anything, and I easily could have just walked away and pretended like nothing ever happened. I could have told Sir Monkeypants that the scratches on the van were from the Superstore parking lot (although, I did have three little witnesses in the back seat, two of whom can’t seem to keep their mouths shut when it comes to being on the lam, so I probably wouldn’t have gotten away with that part).

I have to admit, the thought did cross my mind to just act like nothing happened, to never call the guy, to let it just go. But in the end, I couldn’t do it, so I emailed him and gave him my name and phone number, and the rest is history.

I talked on the phone with SUVGuy at least four or five times in the past few days and every time he made it a point of saying how amazed he was that I had contacted him. I think I totally restored his faith in humanity. On every phone call he told me that I was one of the nicest people he’d ever met. I think he was pretty impressed that I didn’t argue with him or try to make it into his fault or anything like that. I just told the insurance companies what had happened and we all agreed it was my fault and it was all taken care of easily.

And SUVGuy thinks I am totally rocking awesome. In fact on our last phone call he mentioned having me and the TurtleHeads over for a BBQ, because I seem like such a sweet lady. I’m still feeling like a total moron about the accident in the first place so I think I don’t really need to be socializing with the guy. But I do think if I had shown the slightest bit of interest, I’d be dining at his house on the weekend.

So in the end I kind of came away with a good feeling about it. It’s really nice to hear — several times over — that you are a great, kind, super nice person. Really I could listen to that kind of stuff all day long and twice on Sunday.

Almost makes it worthwhile to have hit someone! Oh, everybody calm down. I said ALMOST.

I haven’t been around in a few days because I’ve been in a funk. And know what happens when I post when I’m in a funk? You get funky posts, that’s what.

Ba dum bum!

Last Friday I had a very minor fender bender that was completely and totally my fault. The van is fine — barely scratched, nothing a bottle of touch-up paint from Canadian Tire won’t fix — but of course, the guy I rubbed up against was driving a shiny clean, brand new, Mercedes SUV. I’m still waiting for quotes for repairs to his car, so I can figure out if I can just pay for it by myself or if I need to get my insurance to cover it. Either way, though, it’ll cost me money that we could have spent on stuff that is much, much more fun.

Although Sir Monkeypants has been very generous and kind, I still feel like a total idiot. Hence the funk. And I don’t mean in the good 70s way, either.

Since I didn’t feel like posting I spent the last few days going through every post I’ve made since I started this blog over four years ago. Most of my old posts needed formatting fixes from the LJ import, so I was repairing them, and also, I was reading them over in order to put together this page of “Turtlehead Favourites.” It’s a list of about 50 of my best posts from the past four years, sort of a little get-to-know-me for anyone who is new here and has a couple of hours to burn.

Re-reading all my old posts, however, did nothing to help with the funk situation. Back in November 2007, I took part in NaBloPoMo, an event in which I posted every single day. I loved it, and I felt like I produced some of the best posts I’d ever written. I thought that it would be a great idea, then, to continue to post five or six times a week, on the theory that it would get me writing and get me praticing and get me creating great stuff. But I found that in 2008, I haven’t really been happy with my posting — my blog entries are all long winded and chatty without being very interesting and in general are not very good. So perhaps taking a break from blogging is a good idea. Not to give it up altogether, but maybe not to feel pressure to write something, anything, when I don’t have anything meaningful to say.

Summer is the perfect time to be a little less posty, anyway, because there’s so much fabulous stuff going on instead. I spent almost all winter pining for the day when we’d be able to get out of the house, and then May and June were unseasonably cold and rainy, and the patio work had torn up the backyard, and I despaired that we’d be trapped in here forever. Heeeeeeeere’s MOMMY!

However, July has dawned beautifully sunny and warm and the past week has been almost dreamlike in its glory. It’s been a festival of bubble blowing, chalk drawing, swinging, and riding bikes to the park. We’ve been having BBQs and eating popsicles. We’ve been to the petting zoo, the experimental farm, the splash park, and for picnics. We’ve been through a whole bottle of sunscreen already.

Just being able to wander out into the backyard without having to put on shoes — let alone snow pants — is heavenly. Being able to sit in a chair sipping on a lemonade, pushing Little Miss Sunshine in the baby swing while Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley spray each other with squirt guns is divine.

In short, summer is AWESOME. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be outside.

I’ve been cleaning up my old posts that I imported from LiveJournal — most of them encountered minor formatting errors when they were imported. It’s taking forever. I have four years of past posts to correct so they should all be finished sometime in the year 2010. I hope.

Anyway, I came across this post from back in 2004, made when I was packing for our move before Gal Smiley was born. In it I note that my mother’s mother, my Nana, is a very streamlined woman who never keeps anything. Her need to throw things away led my mother to become a total pack rat, who never gets rid of anything. Her keeping of everything has led her daughters, on the most part, to be thrower-outers.

It’s a chain of tosser-pack rat-tosser. Yet it still amazes me when the Captain, taking his turn in the cycle, wants to keep everything in the world. It’s as if this blog has taught me nothing.

Both Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley are very prolific producers of art. Our art process around here goes like this: completed art goes in a big messy pile in the office; every three months we sort the pile into Captain versus Gal, keep versus recycle/throw away; the keep piles get divided into a pile of three or four things to keep in their permanent collection (in an art box in their room), a pile of things to send to each grandmother, and a pile of things to display in the playroom.

Lately the Captain has tried to circumnavigate the process by declaring that his artworks are “gifts” for me and Sir Monkeypants. He knows that “gift” art does not have to go in the big pile for future sorting; instead he gets to put it on our bedside tables where we can admire it and show how much we love it by gazing at it affectionately every day.

Plus we can’t really throw it away as it would hurt his feelings. Aha!

So now we both have a growing pile of art on our bedside tables, and I can’t find my alarm clock any more or see the massive pile of books I’m supposed to be reading. We can’t go on like this. Eventually we have to get rid of the pile.

So…how long do you think we need to keep various works of art in this scenario? Until he forgets about the ones at the bottom of the pile? Until he’s spending the night at a sleepover at a friend’s house?

Until he goes to university?

Maybe we should just hang it all on the walls and open a gallery. We’ll make a mint!

We have a new patio!

It’s been finished for about a week now. It took about eight weeks from first digging to completely finished, which is longer than we really wanted to be without a backyard, but now that it’s done…I no longer care. It’s so gorgeous! It’s exactly what we wanted and I’m really, really happy with it. As soon as it was all done I actually went out there and lay down on it and just basked in its glory.

Now if only we could find a way to eliminate all the other grass in our yard, we’d be on to something!

Here’s a picture of the back of our house now (I wish I had a before shot, but oh well).

The patio extends over to the side of the house and then wraps around to form a walkway to our side door. It turns out that the bend around the corner creates a perfect little space for our wading pool. Here’s a picture of that part.

Here’s a closeup of the side stairs (which are the same as the back stairs, only a little smaller). The stairs were by far the most expensive part of this project — as they were very labour intensive — but they are our favourite part.

Now we have the rest of the summer to work on some finishing touches. On the side of the house where the walkway is, we want to rip out all the grass (or, more accurately, weeds) on the house side, under the air conditioner and other pipes and stuff, and replace it with river rock. On the fence side of the walkway, we’d like to tear out the grass as well, and put in a flower garden. That’s more work, though, so we’re going to need some serious motivational caffeine before starting that job.

The pathway only extends as far as the gate, and then there’s about 10 more feet to get to the driveway, so I plan to put in some stepping stones to complete the walkway. I’m going to use kits to make the stepping stones as an art project with the kids, and have them stamp their hands and feet in them. Cuuuuuute.

Yesterday was Canada Day here, and although some parts of the country use the closest Monday or Friday as the holiday, in order to make a long weekend out of it, in Ottawa you always get July 1st itself as your holiday. Sir Monkeypants had the day off and everything was closed so we decided to just have a day of fun instead of trying to do any work around the house. We took the kids to the Canada Day In Kanata party, where there was free face painting and jumpy castles and a midway and dog shows and highland dancing (LOVE IT, I did it as a kid and got all nostalgic). It was a beautiful day and we had a great time although it was extremely crowded, so we wound up spending at least half the time waiting in line for stuff. Still it was nice to be out and about and it’s amazing how many people you can run into that you know when moving through a crowd of thousands. It’s a small world!

Anyway, after the party we came home and got out our wading pool and our Dora sprinkler, and the boys next door came over and everyone had a big water fight with squirt guns while Little Miss Sunshine slept. Eventually our kids got cold so we got them dressed, and about five minutes later Captain Jelly Belly forgot he didn’t have his bathing suit on anymore and jumped into the pool. It was really hilarious and we all had a good laugh and the Captain loved it, he just loves playing the clown and being everyone’s entertainment.

Also hilarious, this conversation Sir Monkeypants had with the kids during water play time:

Sir Monkeypants: I’m hearing a lot of talk of butts and poop. I don’t want to hear any more of that.
Gal Smiley: What about PENISES? Can we talk about PENISES?
Sir Monkeypants: No.

I’m sure that added a special moment to all our neighbours’ Canada Day parties!

Afterwards we fired up the BBQ for the first time this year (we had to disconnect it during the building of the patio) and had a yummy dinner. Eaten outside. On the patio. It was a perfect evening, sunny and warm with a gentle breeze and no bugs at all. Plus, yum.

Altogether a fantastic day spent in our new backyard. I can’t wait to get out there again today.